am about to put the finishing touches to a media servere in the next month or so. Need some help from experienced users wrt configuring this type of green drive.

from what I have read the drive spins down in such a way that with SMART enabled , it can mark the drive as bad . Is that a problem with this type of raid? am I worrying unecisarily(sp)  ?? will I need to use that WD tool that out there to cnfigure it , or can I use them out of the box?

 

any comments welcome ... there are a lot of these drives out there, so some one must have experience with them.

 

Thanks in advance

japilch,

 

You should be able to use these drives out of the box.

 

With the WD Green series drives, here is what I know:

 

The Green series drives do like to park themselves a lot and this activity used to be reported in SMART with earlier Green drives.  I believe WD has stopped reporting the head parks to SMART when it is due to the energy saving profile being active.  That said, you can also apply a software patch to disable the power saving mode, but WD has stated this WILL void your warranty.

 

In this form of RAID, the array is not dependent on all disks being active at one time.  In fact, one of the advantages is that you can keep all of your disks asleep except for the disk(s) in use.  Since the storage model for unRAID promotes only using the active drives, I think the increase in your number of parks would be minimal as compared to using these drives in a desktop or theater computer.

am about to put the finishing touches to a media servere in the next month or so. Need some help from experienced users wrt configuring this type of green drive.

from what I have read the drive spins down in such a way that with SMART enabled , it can mark the drive as bad . Is that a problem with this type of raid? am I worrying unecisarily(sp)  ?? will I need to use that WD tool that out there to cnfigure it , or can I use them out of the box?

 

any comments welcome ... there are a lot of these drives out there, so some one must have experience with them.

 

Thanks in advance

 

Short answer, these drives are great of unRAID use.  There is no special configuration needed.  Lots of people here use them with great success.

Thanks your your replies ...I was reading reviews on newegg and came across a waring about using these drives in raids, glad to know they are ok as is.

 

one other qn can I ru the server without any drives attached to configure it?

Thanks your your replies ...I was reading reviews on newegg and came across a waring about using these drives in raids, glad to know they are ok as is.

 

one other qn can I ru the server without any drives attached to configure it?

 

As you could probably guess, few people run unRAID with no drives.  There was a user a while back that had trouble with no drives attached.  May have been fixed.

I actually ran unRAID for a few days with no drives attached to just get a feel for the web interface and to test my new build.  I did not experience any problems using it in that limited capacity.

am about to put the finishing touches to a media servere in the next month or so. Need some help from experienced users wrt configuring this type of green drive.

from what I have read the drive spins down in such a way that with SMART enabled , it can mark the drive as bad . Is that a problem with this type of raid? am I worrying unecisarily(sp)  ?? will I need to use that WD tool that out there to cnfigure it , or can I use them out of the box?

 

any comments welcome ... there are a lot of these drives out there, so some one must have experience with them.

 

I just want to clarify something that appears to have been overlooked here.  The original poster indicates Western Digital FALS drives.  these are NOT the GP series drives, these are the BLACK EDITION drives.  1TB green drives would be EADS or EACS depending on cache amount.  I think what the original poster was eluding to was the TLER setting on the WD drives and the ability to enable TLER to prevent a drive from dropping out of an array due to delays when a drive enters a long recovery mode.  You shouldn't need to do this for unRAID.

am about to put the finishing touches to a media servere in the next month or so. Need some help from experienced users wrt configuring this type of green drive.

from what I have read the drive spins down in such a way that with SMART enabled , it can mark the drive as bad . Is that a problem with this type of raid? am I worrying unecisarily(sp)  ?? will I need to use that WD tool that out there to cnfigure it , or can I use them out of the box?

 

any comments welcome ... there are a lot of these drives out there, so some one must have experience with them.

 

I just want to clarify something that appears to have been overlooked here.  The original poster indicates Western Digital FALS drives.  these are NOT the GP series drives, these are the BLACK EDITION drives.  1TB green drives would be EADS or EACS depending on cache amount.  I think what the original poster was eluding to was the TLER setting on the WD drives and the ability to enable TLER to prevent a drive from dropping out of an array due to delays when a drive enters a long recovery mode.  You shouldn't need to do this for unRAID.

 

 

That is exactly what I meant - so if I understand you corrctly I should not need to change the tler settling from default?

I do not believe you should.

 

I'm running several WD 750gb drives that have TLER problems in conventional RAID arrays and have not run into a problem because unRAID only writes or reads from one data disk at a time. I've also ran full parity checks with these drives and have not experience any problems.